![Code Switch](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/09/22/code-switch_tile_npr-network-01_sq-02ce31e198d3918fb20e7c3e519566ba44f86bda.jpg?s=1100&c=15&f=jpeg)
From 'fight the power' to advertising for the power: hip-hop turns 50
From 'fight the power' to advertising for the power: hip-hop turns 50
![A dj plays two records that look like globes.](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2023/08/08/global-hip-hop-50_wide-406fb613b22feba96e27c0cd5bed18b4f02aeb2a.jpg?s=1100&c=85&f=jpeg)
The legend goes that on a sweaty August night in 1973, there was a block party in the South Bronx where DJs had to hack a streetlight to power their equipment. Someone picked up a mic and spontaneously started rhyming over the the breakbeat, and that's how hip-hop was born. In the five decades since that eureka — or, rather, that "yoooo" — moment, hip-hop music and culture has morphed into a multi-billion dollar industry, with billionaire artists, and global fandom. And as hip-hop evolves, its many contradictions become more obvious.
In this week's Code Switch we dig into those contradictions - how hip-hop is "fight the power" but also advertises for the power; how rappers rhyme about injustice and inequality while also toting their grind and how they've come up or will come up; and how the conditions that created hip-hop are ones of American deprivation, but American institutions have helped the genre and culture thrive all over the world.
This episode was engineered by Maggie Luthar.